Behind the towering Jachum lies one of Homowo’s quietest lessons: every community must decide what it is ready to leave behind.

For years, the towering Jachum that appeared along Teshie’s shoreline during Homowo carried an air of mystery. From a distance, it could easily be mistaken for a sacred idol.

Built from old shoes, broken furniture, chamber pots, battered doors, and discarded household items, it looked less like a festival installation and more like an object demanding caution.

The surprise is that it represents the exact opposite.

In Teshie, one of the historic Ga communities of Accra, the Jachum is assembled as a symbolic collection of everything the town chooses to reject. It is a public act of release, transforming unwanted objects into a shared statement that some burdens belong in the past.

The ritual reaches its climax after Kplejoo, when the Jachum is carried toward the sea before the community gathers for Tsesebumon, another significant Homowo observance. The ocean becomes the final destination, receiving the towering bundle in a gesture that signals renewal rather than destruction.

That symbolism feels strikingly modern. Long before conversations about decluttering, emotional healing, or fresh starts became fashionable, the Ga people had already embedded a communal version of those ideas into one of their most important festivals.

Homowo itself commemorates resilience after famine, celebrating abundance with rituals, drumming, dancing, and the sprinkling of kpokpoi, the traditional corn meal offered in remembrance of ancestors and gratitude for survival.

The Jachum adds another layer to that story. It reminds us that prosperity is not only about welcoming new blessings but also about making room for them.

Seen from afar, it can appear intimidating. Seen up close, it becomes one of Teshie’s most profound cultural teachings: sometimes a community heals by deciding together what it will no longer carry.

There is a particular quality of light in Accra that never fully leaves you. For Gabriel Selassie Tsagli, a Ghanaian artist living between Accra and Berlin, it is this light—alongside the memory of a specific mother and a specific city—that anchors his first solo exhibition in his birthplace.

Son of Kafui at Gallery 1957 is a homecoming in the truest sense. The title itself is an intimacy: Kafui, meaning “love” or “son of God’s own,” was the name of Tsagli’s late mother.

Following his return to Accra in 2025, Tsagli has created a body of work that doesn’t merely depict grief but gives it form, movement, and colour.

The exhibition begins where all loss begins—in the body’s remembrance of place. Tsagli’s paintings emerge from lived experience rather than pre-imagined form.

He builds surfaces through accumulation, layering, pressing, and scraping paint until figures appear “as though remembered rather than constructed”.

This is not figurative painting in the traditional sense; here, figuration and abstraction overlap, allowing bodies and faces to emerge and recede like recollections themselves.

Colour serves as a generative force. Orange suggests action and vitality, while blue becomes a space for reflection and articulation. Held in tension, these chromatic forces create an emotional architecture that resists closure, sustaining ambiguity across the works.

The figure of his mother recurs throughout, not as a portrait or a likeness, but as atmosphere, material trace, and presence suspended in the space between what is here and what is gone.

Curated by Marina Paulenka, the exhibition considers return not as resolution but as an ongoing negotiation.

Accra itself becomes a living presence, a shifting organism that evolves alongside the artist’s understanding of home—an understanding complicated by a life shaped by movement between Ghana and Germany.

What makes Son of Kafui remarkable is its refusal to resolve grief. Instead, Tsagli invites us to remain with what resists closure, to encounter meaning as it unfolds.

In doing so, he transforms personal loss into a broader reflection on how we carry people, places, and histories within us. The exhibition runs at Gallery 1957 until 12 September 2026.

A constellation is never just about the stars. It is about the lines we imagine between them.

That idea sits quietly at the heart of Nsoromma, a group exhibition at The Mix Art Gallery bringing together five participants from the Rising Star 2026 cohort: Albert Nii Nortey Dowuona, Baaba Sarpong, Christabel Dzandu, Paul Leslie Ahadji and Emmanuel Tetteh.

Named after the Akan word for “children of the stars,” Nsoromma takes celestial imagery beyond decoration.

Here, the night sky becomes a way of asking an older Ghanaian question: where do we come from, and what parts of that inheritance continue to shape who we become?

The exhibition’s significance lies partly in how these emerging artists approach cultural memory. Tradition does not appear as a sealed archive or an untouched inheritance.

It is something negotiated—carried through families, altered by migration, questioned through personal experience and reinterpreted by each generation.

Across painting, installation and mixed media, the artists explore ritual, spirituality, belonging and self-discovery.

Their works occupy the space between what is inherited and what is invented, reflecting a generation increasingly comfortable moving between Ghanaian cultural references and contemporary artistic languages.

That makes the constellation metaphor especially fitting. A single star can be striking, but its meaning changes when placed among others.

So it is with these five artistic voices: distinct in approach, yet connected by questions of identity and place.

Rather than offering definitive answers, Nsoromma asks visitors to “find their own cosmologies”—to look, interpret and perhaps recognise something of themselves in the spaces between the stars.

Presented as part of Accra Art Week, the exhibition runs until September 2, 2026.